Marcel Ophüls’s four-and-a-half-hour pursuit of Klaus Barbie is documentary at its most patient and most sceptical, and it is more interested in the people who found him useful than in the man himself. Long, occasionally self-regarding, and we would cut very little of it.
Klaus Barbie ran the Gestapo in Lyon during the occupation, and the Hôtel Terminus is where he did it. Marcel Ophüls spends surprisingly little of his 268 minutes in the building. He spends them in Bolivia, where Barbie lived for decades under another name; in Germany, where schoolfriends and neighbours remember him; in America, with the intelligence men who employed him after the war; and in Lyon in 1987, around the court where he was finally tried. Barbie himself, first in the cast list, is mostly an old face in archive footage and a man who declines to be interviewed. The film is not really about him. It is about everyone who found him useful.
Ophüls made The Sorrow and the Pity in 1969, and the method here is the same, carried further and with less patience for evasion. He appears in frame, knocking. He knocks on doors that stay shut and films the door. When a retired American officer explains that Barbie was a good source and that the Russians were the enemy by then, Ophüls lets him finish, waits, and asks the next question, and the pause does more than any narration could. We have rarely seen a documentary maker so willing to be rude, or so careful about when.
What made us angry, and we were angry for long stretches, was not Barbie. It was the tone of the people around him. Former associates in Bolivia and old acquaintances in Germany describe a courteous man, a good neighbour, a loyal friend. These are ordinary sentences and Ophüls films them at ordinary length, and by the second hour their ordinariness had become the most frightening thing on screen. Nobody in this film thinks of himself as a villain. That is what it is for.
The editors, Albert Jurgenson and Catherine Zins, cut the testimony against itself. Raymond Aubrac, arrested in Lyon in 1943, and Lucie Aubrac, who got him out, talk about what happened in Barbie’s cells; a man in a comfortable chair, a continent away, explains that it was a long time ago. Reuben Aaronson shoots the interviews plainly, medium shots in living rooms and offices with whatever light was already there. Nothing is dressed. When the camera moves it is because Ophüls is walking towards somebody, and the handheld wobble tells us he is not sure he will be let in.
Beate Klarsfeld and Serge Klarsfeld, who spent years tracking Barbie in South America, are the film’s conscience and its plot, and Ophüls lets them be tired as well as right. Jacques Vergès, Barbie’s defence lawyer, is given room to argue that France has crimes of its own to answer for, and Ophüls neither agrees nor cuts him off; he lets us watch a clever man enjoy himself, which is more damaging than an interruption. Claude Lanzmann, whose Shoah had come out three years earlier, Günter Grass, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Régis Debray and Bertrand Tavernier appear as commentators on what France and Germany chose to remember. Some of these appearances are brief, and one or two feel like Ophüls ringing round his friends.
It is long, and it knows it. There are stretches in the Bolivian section where a fourth witness makes a point three have already made, and Ophüls’s habit of putting himself in the picture, sighing, needling, occasionally performing exasperation for the camera, tips from method into mannerism more than once. We also wanted more of Lyon. The city where the crimes were committed is less present than the countries where they were excused, and that may be Ophüls’s argument, but it leaves the victims quieter than the bystanders.
Watch it over two evenings, as you would read a long book, and do not expect to be told what to think at the close; Ophüls assumes you have been listening. Set aside the time. It does not get easier as it goes, and it should not.
